Hampstead

Since the overground train was actually running this weekend (various parts of the line tend to close on weekends for scheduled maintenance), we took the train over to Camden Arts Centre to catch their latest exhibit. The building is such a lovely space that it's always a pleasure to wander around, even on the rare occasions (like today) when the show is disappointing.

With no real destination in mind after we left the gallery, we wandered through Hampstead, and the combination of hills and warm sunshine meant we shed our scarves and unzipped our winter coats as we walked. Hampstead is always a great place for a stroll, and its lovely buildings, gardens, and lanes are filled with postcard-perfect charm.

John Constable was fond of painting Hampstead Heath, and the Constable family tomb is in a Hampstead graveyard.

Back when we visited London in 2005, we sat outside the pub in the centre of the next photo, sipping drinks in the hot July air, marvelling at this wonderful neighbourhood that seemed to reward walkers with lovely details around every turn.

Hampstead is filled with narrow pedestrian paths, and when you start down a path, you usually can't see where it ends, adding to the fun of a Hampstead stroll.

The fire insurance plaque on this house is considered rather valuable today,

although it had a much more practical value when it was initially affixed to the house, since it marked the house as insured, and thus eligible to be attended to by the affiliated fire brigade. Back before there was one fire brigade that worked in a defined geographical region, if your house was on fire and you didn't have a fire insurance plaque or the brigade that arrived wasn't one covered by your insurance scheme, you were out of luck--very strange to think about today! While the owl beside this next door was what first caught my attention, Bob pointed out the swan knocker that completes the bird theme:

Speaking of birds, I quite like the name of this yard:

I almost missed the eclectic detail on this gate as we walked past:

We moved our clocks forward an hour today for British Summer Time (all you lucky Canadians out there have been enjoying that extra hour of sunlight for almost an entire month!), so after browsing for a while in the Hampstead branch of one of our favourite bookshops, Daunt Books, we felt like it was still only 4:30 P.M. or so when we walked back out onto the bright street. When we realised it was closer to 6:00 P.M., we popped into Marks & Spencer to pick up some pizzas for dinner, and got on our train home. When I checked the boxes at home to see what temperature to set the oven to, I noticed a very strange blurb that seemed to belong to a science-fiction film:

This must be some sort of early April Fool's joke, right? I turned the box around and around, and sure enough, there was a "smart" code:

It turns out that the Smart Oven does actually exist, although it seems quite strange to think that anyone would need a special oven to cook store-bought pizza! Of course, this gadget doesn't seem targeted at the gourmet cook, with a website that features downloadable smart codes for "recipes" involving heating/ cooking potatoes, soup, and spaghetti on toast. Wouldn't it take longer to look up, download, print, and scan a smart code to heat up some canned soup than to heat the same soup in a conventional microwave (or even on the stove itself)? Ah, but the so-called Smart Oven doesn't exactly seem to be a haven of logic, so I guess I shouldn't ask such questions . . .